ENGL 650M Tales of Terror & Shilling Shockers: Jarrells M‐F 11:00‐1:45 Popular Culture & Romanticism (meets with ENGL 419M) Wordsworth wrote his poetry in part to counteract what he saw as Romantic England’s “degraded thirst after outrageous stimulation.” In this course, instead of studying the responses of the poets, we’ll look at the outrageous stimulation for which Wordsworth’s contemporaries supposedly thirsted. What was popular culture in the period? What kind of view of Romanticism does a study of popular cultural forms provide? How different were these forms (and Wordsworth’s lament for them) from those of our own day? These are some of the questions we will ask. The focus of our survey will be popular print culture: frantic novels, tales of terror, murderous magazine editors, and periodical personalities. But we will give some attention, too, to the visual and the performing arts (panorama painting, peep‐shows, music halls, and popular science lectures). Works studied will include essays by Mary Robinson, William Hazlitt, Pierce Egan, and Charles Lamb; a few tales of terror from Blackwood’s Magazine and some gothic bluebooks (also known as “shilling shockers”); a recent book by Richard Hamblyn on Luke Howard, the “man who named the clouds”; and accounts from past and present of life in the Romantic metropolis. Requirements include regular response papers, a presentation, a research project, and a final exam. ENGL 650R 19th C African American Literature Trafton M‐Th 1:00‐3:15 (meets with ENGL 450D) This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important issues, themes, and texts associated with African American literature. The selections we will cover will include poetry, drama, song and other folk traditions, political manifestos and correspondence, as well as the most recognizable forms in this tradition, the novel and the autobiography, which are often fused into the distinctly African American genre known as the slave narrative. As this course is meant to act in conjunction with other courses in both the English Department and the African American Studies Program, our focus will be the literature of black Americans from the early days of the colonies to the year marking the close of the Civil War, 1865. Many of the traditions we will study will have roots much earlier, and lives far beyond, this period; indeed, part of the aim of this course will be to provide students with the tools to investigate texts and issues which lie outside the specific bearings of this course. Nevertheless, there will be necessary attention paid to the particular historical and cultural contexts which produced the texts we will read, and by the end of the semester, a working familiarity with some of these contexts will be expected. At the conclusion of this course, then, students will be expected to be familiar with the principle features of the early African American literary tradition, including the characteristics of specific authors and texts as well as their varying contexts more generally; they will also be expected to show mastery of the skills involved in crafting an analytic essay appropriate for an upper‐division English course. ENGL 783 Applied English Syntax Tasseva M‐F 5:00‐7:15 (Crosslisted LING 725) Course will meet May 31 – June 23 Changing to ENGL 583/LING 525 Advanced English Grammar Advanced English Grammar is a course designed to enhance students’ abilities in analyzing the structure of spoken and written English. Emphasis is placed on restrictions on word formation and sentence structure, and the relations between sentence structure and meaning. Both Standard American English and its regional and social varieties will be used in the examination of how intended meaning is conveyed through sentence structure. Advanced English Grammar is geared towards the needs of present and future teachers of English. It will provide students with both the skills necessary to explain why English works the way it works, and opportunities to apply those skills into the practical analysis of the English language. Ultimately, the course will prepare you to answer questions that first and second language speakers of English might ask you, such as: 1) Why can you say disappear but you cannot say dislove? 2) Why can’t you say in English the my house? 3) Do What did she buy? and She bought what? mean the same thing? 4) Which one is correct: John and I went to the movies or John and me went to the movies?” REQUIRED TEXTS: Celce‐Murcia, Marianne, and Diane Larsen‐Freeman. 1999. The Grammar Book: An ESL/EFL Teacher’s Course. Second Edition. Cengage Learning. ENGL 680 Survey of Linguistics Tasseva M‐F 5:00‐7:15 (Crosslisted LING 600) Course will meet July 6 – July 29 This course is designed to introduce students to the field of linguistics and provide a general understanding of human language—its defining characteristics, how it works, and how linguists examine it. It will examine the component parts of language, namely, phonetics and phonology (the sound system), morphology (the internal structure of words), syntax (the structure of sentences), and semantics (meaning) and typology (how languages differ from each other). The course will focus on cross‐linguistic and universal properties of language structure, and assigned problems will come from a wide range of typologically diverse languages. The overall goals of this class are (a) to become familiar with the key concepts and terminology needed to describe and analyze language; (b) to gain a basic understanding of the way language works; and (c) to appreciate how languages differ (and how they're the same), and (d) to be able to use this knowledge in an academic context. In particular, the learning outcomes are: Following completion of Ling 600 students will be able to: • identify the key areas of linguistic research. • define the key terminology and concepts used in the field of linguistics. • understand, exemplify and explain linguistic analyses and methodology. • apply key linguistic terminology and concepts to new problems/data sets. • describe how various languages differ from each other with respect to their linguistic properties. • analyze linguistic data from various sources. • formulate and discuss their own linguistic hypotheses. • research the literature on the linguistic properties of a given language. • summarize and synthesize these findings and relate them to the contents covered in class. • design and present a linguistic presentation. REQUIRED TEXTS: O'Grady, William, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff & Janie Rees‐Miller (Eds). 2009. Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction, 6th edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.